Millwater ROMEOs

Our ROMEO (Retired Old Men Eating Out) lunch was preceded by a visit to the local Silverdale St John Ambulance Station, where we were hosted by Penny Howard who is also a Millwaterian. Penny is undertaking degree studies to becoming a Paramedic, and she gave us an excellent presentation about the significant history and local structure of St John in NZ and in the region.

Some of the ‘interesting’ issues staff have to deal with are very surprising and concerning. The cost of the operation requires considerable community funding alongside the funds received from ACC, DHBs and Government. The cost of an ambulance callout is around $690, but the patient is billed only $85 for this service and many people try to default on paying the fee. A new stretcher for an Ambulance is at least $7,000.

It is also concerning how many unnecessary calls are made for an Ambulance and that is why quite a lot of triage is done over the phone, to try and respond effectively and allocate resources most appropriately. St John makes a major contribution to our community in many ways and needs every support we can offer. The ten ROMEOs each made a donation to the local St John. It was great to have Penny make time available for our group, and plenty of questions were asked and answered in an informative and entertaining way. Inspection of the latest equipment was undertaken, with one ROMEO having his pulse checked by Penny, before we moved to the Northern Union in Silverdale for an excellent lunch and then to the outing organiser’s home for coffee, more conversation and delicious home-made cake.

From the age of around four and a half, children develop phonemic awareness, which is the ability to identify, blend, segment and manipulate oral language structure. For example, an awareness that the word “dog” starts with a D-sound and ends with a G (speech) sound and that the word “dog” rhymes with frog. Phonemic awareness is essential to the development of literacy skills.

As a parent, you can be developing these essential skills in your child from a very early age, by reading to them and paging through books together, naming objects and talking about them. When they get a bit older, you could make them aware of rhymes and how the end sounds of rhyming words sound the same. You could also encourage them to think up more words that rhyme. Even if they come up with words that are not real words, it would still show you that they understand the concept of rhyming. Playing games like “I spy…” is a great way to teach children to think about the initial sounds in words.

If you think that your child may be struggling in this area of development, please call me to have a chat about that.

The awareness of sound

From birth, an awareness of sound develops in children. This gets more and more sophisticated as they grow and are able to use language and to think about language (a skill known as Linguistic Auditory Processing).

At first, the infant is able to detect sounds and localise them, but as children grow they learn to ignore background noise and focus on something that has their attention.

Children learn to listen to voices and speech and discriminate speech sounds from other aspects of speech like pitch, duration and intensity. Another important aspect of auditory awareness is self-monitoring – the ability to change speech production based on the information you get from hearing yourself speak. Tanya Collett 09 421 1337 • 021 949539 www.hearsay.co.nz